the idealist jeffrey sachs and the quest to end poverty by nina munk

[...]... the sca olding, came the roof and walls, made of heavy grass matting and cowhides to keep out sand and dust and rain Every morning at dawn, Ahmed and his siblings headed out with their donkeys to gather rewood and fetch water from nearby streams or wells Afternoons, the children herded the camels and cattle, roaming barefoot through the bush in search of grazing land When the seasons changed and the. .. impersonal—hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, their pensions, their dignity and yet the plan worked, at least in the short term: strict scal and monetary discipline managed to lower the country’s annual in ation rate to about 15 percent “Shock therapy,” as the approach was later called, was to become Sachs s trademark From Bolivia, Sachs went on to Poland It was 1989, and the Berlin Wall had... concluded his and Lipton’s memo, “there is no viable alternative Unless Poland jumps to a market economy, the current misery and chaos will surely continue.” In an interview with Weschler, Sachs compared himself to a trauma doctor who arrives in the nick of time to resuscitate the patient “Look, when a guy comes into the emergency room and his heart’s stopped,” he said, “you just rip open the sternum and don’t... for days, Ahmed convinced the man to recommend him for a government scholarship “Either I succeed or I don’t leave the o ce,” Ahmed recalled “I told him, ‘I need your help.’ He told me, ‘We are sorry, but we have no support to give you.’ I said, ‘Look, I have gone to the chief, to the assistant chief, to the counselor, to the member of parliament, and now I come to you as the last resort.’ He was an... describe the Shifta War as “a military onslaught on the entire pastoral way of life.” At the time, Maalim knew that he had to save his family Along with thousands of other displaced Somali-Kenyans, he, his three wives, and his children took refuge in southern Somalia Hemmed in by war, unable to migrate with the seasons, they found it increasingly di cult to nd pastureland for their animals For the rst... changed and the soil began to crack and the wadis ran dry, Ahmed’s father and his wives would dismantle their aqals, pack up their few belongings, and with their livestock and children, begin the long walk upland to greener pastures For a long time, the Shifta War seemed far away, remote Ahmed’s father had never paid much attention to politics, until it became impossible to ignore what was going on... health care and sanitation, bore wells and protected springs, diesel generators, and so forth In order to bypass corrupt government o cials, the project would hire its own teams of highly trained locals and deliver aid directly to the villages The ongoing results of the ve-year project would be tested and monitored by academics at Columbia University, their goal being to demonstrate that Sachs s systematic,... drilled in 1997 by UNICEF in an otherwise arid, inhospitable stretch of land Thanks to the borehole, Dertu had become a crucial stopping-o point for the region’s nomadic pastoralists All day and sometimes through the night, they arrived with their caravans of camels, long-horned cattle, donkeys, and sheep You could tell they were approaching by the clouds of dust that rose and drifted across the dry savanna—camels... them, but economic development does not happen overnight Already Ahmed and his sta had given out mosquito nets and had vaccinated thousands of camels, cattle, sheep, donkeys, and goats Using basic materials donated by the Millennium Villages Project and UNICEF, they’d encouraged the people of Dertu to dig and build fteen pit latrines To reverse the baleful e ects of deforestation and erosion, and to. .. adviser” to the United Nations secretary-general And in a triumph for Columbia University, he’d left Harvard that year to become Columbia’s Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development; professor of health policy and management; and director of the university’s Earth Institute For all his titles, Sachs s true vocation is to draw our attention to the scandal of global poverty and to force us to do something . When the seasons changed and the soil began to crack and the wadis ran dry, Ahmed’s father and his wives would dismantle their aqals, pack up their few belongings, and with their livestock and. reducing huge and complex issues to their essence. Above all, it’s his ability to synthesize, to turn ideas into bullet points, that has allowed him to move the issue of global poverty into the mainstream last week? Did he go to the doctor?’ And they’d say, ‘No, no, no, people don’t go to the doctor here.’ What do you mean? What about the medicine? And they’d say, ‘No, no, no, there’s no medicine